The expression fear of heights is often used as synonym of acrophobia defined by the American Psychological Association (APA) as “an excessive, irrational fear of heights, resulting in the avoidance of elevations or marked distress when unable to avoid high places”.
Very often people suffering from fear of heights do not seek treatment for their condition preferring to avoid the fearful situation. This can cause limitations in performing simple tasks of everyday life. Behavioral therapy is mainly used for the treatment of acrophobia. At the basis of the treatment is the exposure of the patient to the anxiogenic stimulus. The subject is slowly encouraged to enter and cope the anxious situation. The stimulus can be imagined (imaginal modality) or delivered for real (in-vivo modality). Among the exposure approaches, systematic desensitization combines exposure with relaxation techniques.
Exposure treatment of acrophobia can make use of Virtual Reality (VR), a technology that immerses subjects in a computer-generated artificial environment offering a high degree of interactivity, sense of presence and multi-sensory stimulation. This has led to Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET), which shows greater efficacy than imaginal exposure. In recent years, many studies have proposed therapeutic treatments involving extended reality (XR) which are able to adapt to the user on the basis of real-time processing of biosignals.
The aims of this thesis are to: (i) identify the EEG signal processing pipeline that maximizes the accuracy of classification between 3 intensity levels (i.e., low, medium and high) of fear of heights in subjects with a different acrophobia severity, (ii) identify possible correlation between the EEG signal, the induced fear level, and the subjects’ self report.